This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Al Davis may be gone, but the ghost of Al Davis is still apparently making roster decisions for the Oakland Raiders.

On Tuesday, the Raiders sent their 2012 first-round draft pick and a second-rounder in 2013 to the Cincinnati Bengals in return for holdout quarterback Carson Palmer.

The second-rounder is conditional. If the Raiders win a playoff game this year, which assumes that Palmer’s peanut-brittle body remains intact, the Bengals get a second first-round pick in 2013 as well.

Given their paucity, any big-time trade in the NFL is news. Given the history of swapping declining veterans for top draft picks, this particular deal is mind-boggling.

Palmer has been cooling his heels this season, taking what is laughingly referred to in professional athletics as a principled stand.

Article Continued Below

After signing a $119 million (all figures U.S.) extension with the Bengals in 2005, Palmer informed the team in the last off-season that he would retire if he wasn’t traded.

It’s understood that Palmer is amenable to restructuring the remaining 3½ years on that deal in order to wedge himself under the $6 million the Raiders have available under the cap. In secular capitalist terms, taking a million-dollar haircut is the first step toward beatification as a football saint.

In a ruthless market like the NFL, trades are, at most, a secondary source of talent. So many players are routinely chopped from the rosters of other teams for economic reasons there’s always a spare body lying around.

When eye-catching trades are done, they tend to be straight swaps or, in the case of players like Randy Moss, the off-loading of a skilled, but unmanageable basket case. The returns are usually skimpy, unless the Raiders are involved.

In 2005, the Raiders traded a first-round pick for Moss, who then took a two-year hiatus from the game while still appearing on the field every Sunday. In 2007, the Patriots got him for a more realistic valuation — a fourth-rounder.

The problem with Moss — and just about every other NFL player swapped for picks — isn’t talent. It’s the understanding that you’ve already been cheated out of your future before the guy plays a game.

Palmer is 31. In NFL quarterback years that’s, like, 114. Whoever Cincinnati gets in return — and it will probably be the sort of elite lineman that only ever becomes available in the draft — is going to offer far more upside over five or seven years than Palmer possibly could. And that could be times two.

The Raiders have now traded three of next year’s picks for quarterbacks — Palmer (first); Terrelle Pryor (third); and Jason Campbell (fourth). It’s time for the Raiders to invent the three-quarterback spread.

The NHL axiom — the team that ends up with the most talented guy wins the trade — doesn’t hold here.

Any NFL team that gives up a player for picks has already won because they’ve sold you something they don’t need anyway. As such, the pressure on the team trading their future for the present is enormous.

Herschel Walker set for the pattern all eternity. In 1989, Minnesota figured they were a running back away from the Super Bowl. Dallas figured they couldn’t get much worse.

Minnesota gave Dallas five men and six picks for Walker. Four of those picks turned into Pro Bowlers. Walker floundered. Dallas built a dynasty on Minnesota’s largesse.

Since then, all major trades are career-killing gambles until (rarely) proven otherwise. So it takes a very special alchemy to do a blockbuster. Most of that brew is made up of desperation.

After nine years in the wilderness — much of it down to Davis’s peculiar obsession with kooks and kickers — the Raiders are unlikely playoff contenders. They lost their starting quarterback, Campbell, to a broken collarbone last weekend. His back-ups are Pryor, who no one really believes is suited as a passer anyway, and Kyle Boller, who is the quarterbacking equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun.

Being desperate isn’t enough. No matter how badly you want to buy, no one sells elite players unless they have a spare. Cincinnati is now enjoying its karmic reward for being forced by Palmer to go with rookie QB Andy Dalton.

Dalton has led the Bengals to a 4-2 record. Every time Dalton won, Palmer’s long list of unshakable demands shrank.

That’s what you need to do a big NFL trade — both a buyer and a commodity who have moved beyond common sense into the unusual sporting territory of compromise.

By every reasonable measure, it’s a terrible deal for Oakland. Clearly, this is about keeping faith with a fan base that suffered mightily because of Davis’s borderline personnel disorder.

Oakland’s best-case outcome is a playoff berth that they will be more than half hoping ends in a loss.

For the rising Bengals, this could be a dynastic launching pad and another in the long list of cautionary tales for would-be buyers.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com